August 10, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from New Politics — The socialist movement in the United States took a big step forward this past weekend as almost 700 delegates representing over 25,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) met at the organization’sbiennial national convention in Chicago. This convention, the first since DSA more than tripled in size following last year’s election, brought together delegates from all of the country’s major cities and many towns large and small.Most were new members who had joined in the last year either came out of the Bernie Sanders campaign or joined in reaction to the frightening prospect of the Donald Trump presidency. The convention cohered the hundreds of new members into a national organization in what was virtually a re-founding of the DSA. It gave them the experience of beginning to run their own organization, and the delegates adopted constitutional changes and policy resolutions that moved the organization to the left.

June 13, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalreposted from Reports from the Economic Front — US-North Korean relations remain very tense, although the threat of a
new Korean War has thankfully receded. Still the US government remains
determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues
to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear
infrastructure. And the North for its part has made it clear that it
would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the
region and even the US itself.

This is not good, but it is important to realize that what is
happening is not new. The US began conducting war games with South
Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included
simulated nuclear attacks against the North, and that was before North
Korea had nuclear weapons. In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to
launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying
its nuclear facilities. In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing
North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act
of war. In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning
for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and
“decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike
nuclear attack.

April 27, 2017 —Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity with the author's permission — The new Trump administration has made NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States, a major issue in its relations with its two neighbours. Recently, Trump has threatened to tear it up. With his standard nationalist demagogy, he claims “previous bad trade deals”, have cost the United States many jobs as a result of American manufacturers moving plants off-shore. He is now in the process of triggering the required ninety day notification period, telling Canada and Mexico the new administration is prepared to bully its way to a new and more favourable arrangement for itself.

March 22, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Since December 9 last year, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made its allegations to U.S. Congressional leaders, ranking politicians of both major parties have gone on a concerted rant against Russia for allegedly subverting American “democracy”. The specific allegations are: (1) that Russian state operatives hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC); (2) that Russia then used WikiLeaks as an intermediary to make public internal DNC emails which would embarrass the DNC and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign; (3) that Russia’s objective was to help Donald Trump win the Presidency; and (4) that Russia’s intervention changed the outcome of the Presidential election. For reasons given below: (1) and (2) are possible but unproven, (3) is unlikely, and (4) is fantasy.

Meanwhile, the major U.S. news media outlets have reported the story with a persistent evasion of highly relevant facts including the U.S. government’s many subversions of elections in other countries.

March 18, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — This is the third of Ernie Tate’s letters to Left Unity detailing and analysing the struggles against Trump as they emerge on the other side of the pond. Ernie is a lifelong revolutionary who emigrated to Canada from Northern Ireland as a young man. He was one of the most important activists of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 1960s and has recently produced a two volume memoir, “Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s”.

--------------

A by-product of present toxic atmosphere in the United States against immigrants and refugees has been a sharp increase in this country in recent weeks in the number of asylum seekers walking across the Canadian border, often placing themselves and their families in harm’s way from our extremely harsh winter. It’s also a consequence it should be noted, of the military interventions by the American empire in the Arab and African world — now greatly destabilized because of it, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. And like everywhere else, reactionary forces here are attempting to exploit it to stoke up anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment.

March 15, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from InfoAUT — When Mohamed Bouazizi
set himself on fire on December 17, 2010 – few of us knew the
dimensions of what was about to happen. North Africa and Southwest Asia
were ticking time-bombs waiting to explode, waiting to manifest,
sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, deep contradictions and new paths
towards the future. Few among us were aware of how unprepared we were
for these events and, initially, for developing a solid analysis of what
was happening beyond the Mediterranean.

At
the time, a friend told me: "These 'springs' have swept away the
Salafis from the history of those countries denying that tendency to be
the dominant one among the youth." The following events, up to the
present ones, demonstrate how incomplete and one-sided this impression
was. We were projecting our expectations on the events. We did not
analyze the facts in all their complexity, for what they were, albeit in
their ambivalence; we looked at them for what we wanted them to be.

March 7, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — One of the most important areas of work for socialists in Europe in the period of Trump will be to establish ongoing working political relationships with comrades in the US and Canada. To that end Left Unity will increase our coverage of politics across the pond. We will begin with a new ‘letter from North America’ courtesy of Ernie Tate. Ernie is a lifelong revolutionary who emigrated to Canada from Northern Ireland as a young man. In the 1960s working in Britain he was one of the most important activists of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He has recently produced a two volume memoir of that period, “Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s”, published by Resistance Books. Now at the age of 82 and living in Toronto he is still active and an acute observer of the political scene. Ernie will send us his thoughts twice monthly. Below are the first two instalment written to Phil Hearse his longtime friend and comrade.

March 2, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalreposted from We Are Many— As Trump enters the White House, millions of people are looking for a way to fight back against what is sure to be an all-out assault on the rights of women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the working class as a whole. Our effectiveness in the struggle ahead requires clear strategy and tactics and a commitment to work together to cohere a strong socialist pole of attraction within the emerging movements against oppression and austerity.

Following the historic national mass mobilizations taking place during the inauguration weekend, the Democratic Socialists of America, the International Socialist Organization and Solidarity invite you to join us for a comradely discussion and debate on the next steps for socialists in the Trump era.

"Please let us remember that to investigate the constitution of the
universe is one of the greatest and noblest problems in nature, and it
becomes still grander when directed toward another discovery."

February 14, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal— When China’s richest man, Want Jianlin, warned last December that a U.S. trade war against China would result in disaster for the United States it was no idle threat. Trump scores political points with his social base each time he rails at Beijing yet the U.S. and the global economy would grind to a halt if it were not for China’s preponderant role in shoring up global capitalism at this moment of acute crisis.

“Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice, to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out.

“The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

January 23, 2017 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – The forces arrayed against Donald Trump’s presidency and neo-fascist movement range from the Central Intelligence Agency to oppressed minorities, and will soon encompass the whole world once his climate change threats are carried out. From above, conflicts will continue with moderate Republicans, Democratic Party elites, so-called Deep State opponents including neoconservative factions of the military, exporting companies concerned about protectionism, and deficit hawks worried about excess spending on filthy-Keynesian infrastructure.

January 9, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– The weeks following an underwhelming Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) mid-September summit in Goa and the United States presidential election in November have unveiled ever-widening contradictions. Thanks to blatant corruption, presidential delegitimation has reached unprecedented levels in both Brazil and South Africa, while ruling-party religious degeneracy in India also included an extraordinary bout of local currency mismanagement. And sudden new foreign-policy divergences may wreak havoc in China and Russia. The BRICS bloc’s relations could well destabilise to the breaking point.

January 8, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– Barack Obama declared to CNN this past December 26 that he could have beaten Donald Trump had he the chance to run against the president elect for a third term, but he may have done more than anyone else to assure Trump’s victory.

While Trump’s election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in US civil society and the political system, a fascist outcome is far from inevitable and will depend on the fight back that has already begun. But that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of a 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized, and watered by the government of outgoing president Barack Obama and the bankrupt liberal elite that Obama’s presidency represents.

January 6, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– A feature of the recent election campaign was the deep divisions in both the Democratic and Republican parties. This was on top of the stalemate in Congress between the twin parties of capitalism. In addition, the nation is polarized over race, the economy and many other issues.

Also, it should be noted that there is and was no mass working class party that could have championed an alternative.

Donald Trump emerged and was then elected as the strongman who would take over and set things right, although exactly how he will do this has been left open on many issues.

It is no exaggeration to state, for instance, that his chief-of-staff, the man Trump turns to first for political advice, is an outright fascist. It is not difficult to ascertain that the leading personnel of the Trump regime, composed of billionaires, ex-generals and ultra-rightist psychopaths, are going to make life harder for the US working class – and by that I mean people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

December 31, 2016 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal–– The sub-freezing temperature was dropping. As the snow began to fall, many felt their hands were too cold to hold signs during the December 17 action. Two dozen had answered the Green Party call to picket the mayor of St. Louis for his efforts to close down New Life Evangelistic Center, the city's homeless “shelter-of-last-resort.” They knew things would be much worse for those forced to sleep in the cold if the shelter were shut down. The action was one in a series of efforts to draw attention to the city government's continual onslaught against those with no place to go.